Over the last decade, I’ve had a couple of skin cancers on my face, and quite a few actinic keratoses – it’s kept my dermatologist busy. The last time I saw her, she had to remove another couple of actinic keratoses and suggested I consider photodynamic therapy to reduce the chance of recurrence; today was the day for the treatment.

The experience started with a facial acetone scrub, then the application of the photosensitized, and then a 90-minute wait for it to sink in. That part was pretty boring – I’d brought my computer, so I caught up on my email a bit.

And then came the real treatment – 16 minutes, 45 seconds with a very bright light bathing my face. They gave me goggles and told me to keep my eyes shut, which I was happy to do. They also gave me a little fan in case I got warm – I was glad I had it, because my face was on fire! I didn’t think to start a podcast playing before I had to close my eyes, so I had nothing to distract me; the best I could do was to tell my watch to time three-minute intervals so I’d have some idea of how long I had left.

I was relieved when the light went out; they had me wash my face with a very gentle wash and put on sunscreen. They told me to avoid bright light for the next few days because my skin will be very light-sensitive – we took a walk near sunset this afternoon and even then, I could feel the effect when the light hit my face.

On a more cheerful note, unplugging the cable modem and giving it a short rest seems to have helped my connectivity; it’s been nearly a full day and all of the channels are still “locked”, though I am seeing some packet loss, so I still see a call to Comcast in my future.

Our Internet has been very slow since we got home – better than the service on the ship, to be sure, but there were long pauses in downloads and many other random freezes. I’d updated all of our access points and switches over the weekend and it didn’t help.

Today, things got even worse. I logged into the cable modem and discovered that several of the downstream channels were “not locked”, and quite a few of the others were reporting lots of errors, not all of which were correctable. I also found some “MDD message timeout” warnings in the event log. So I rebooted the modem (and the router, just for good measure) and things got a lot better – all my channels were locked.

Four hours later, I’ve got two channels are unlocked again and I’m seeing lots of MDD message timeouts. And dropped packets. A little web searching says that the next step is physically unplugging the modem for a minute and letting it try to heal itself – after that, it’ll be time for a call to Xfinity. sigh